China's Achilles Heel: Education System

As China’s once-in-a-decade leadership reshuffle has renewed hopes for reform, few are focusing on an aspect of state policy with the profoundest implications for China’s labor productivity and economic advancement: its education system.

Contra the popular view that China’s rise has something to do with the ability of Chinese kids outcompete American ones in standardized tests, I believe that the continuing emphasis on ideology in the humanities is China’s biggest Achilles heel. Moving up the global value chain is impossible without a dramatic overhaul of its current education system.

Instead of cultivating independent minds, education is first and foremost a device for enforcing Party ideology to the young and impressionable minds. I was reminded of this by the recent news story of five poor boys in Guizhou who accidentally suffocated themselves as they lit a fire in a dumpster to keep warm, kicking up widespread comparisons in the Chinese blogosphere to Hans Christian Andersen‘s “The Little Match Girl,” which is still is taught in Chinese schools.

I learned this story in my grade school in China. Reading about the Guizhou tragedy, my mind rushed back to the key “lessons” from the story, which we were told to memorize for the final exam. Specifically, it was about the brutality and selfishness of capitalist society such that the protagonist’s very life depended exclusively on her commercial enterprise, and that capitalist class divisions promoted exploitation of poor workers like the little girl.

In terms of didactic story-telling in school, little has changed. Consider that this other story recently went viral throughout the Chinese blogosphere: an (as far as I can tell, apocryphal) account of the teaching of the Cinderella fairy tale in a Chinese first-grade classroom. After reading the Cinderella fairy tale aloud, instead of encouraging students to speak up their reactions, the teacher went on reading out the official “meaning” of the tale, signaling that it would be tested on the coming exam. The students took dictation, scrawling furious notes. This involved a lesson reflecting class struggles in the capitalistic world, with the stepmother symbolizing the selfish, heartless, evil ruling class and Cinderella standing for the innocent, loving, and impoverished working class.

One student raised his hand and asked, “Everything but the glass slipper had reverted to their original forms. What does that mean? ”

The teacher dismissed the question out of hand. “It won’t be on the exam. Don’t get distracted by minor point.”

Private Schools as an Alternative

I recently spoke with a senior executive in China’s private education industry about this phenomenon.

“The government worries that without the building of universal communist ideology, their control over the society will be significantly weakened,” she said. “Therefore, textbooks are heavily indoctrinated to serve the Party’s ideology.”

A mother of two kids in their teens, she cited this was a large factor influencing her choice to switch her children out of local schools controlled by the Chinese education bureaus to privately run international schools – an increasingly desirable option for Chinese parents who can afford it.

However, she also does not idealize the American system.

“Chinese schools excel in knowledge-based teaching. For some subjects during the early stages of schooling, this is very important,” she said. “However, Chinese schools pale miserably in comparison to a liberal arts approach adopted by most private schools when it comes to teaching how to learn, not just what to learn. And private schools emphasize collaboration.”

Her last point is critical. The current “gaokao” system – the country-wide college entrance exam that is almost the sole factor determining a student’s college placement – has created a cutthroat competitive learning environment. For many years leading into the “gaokao”, students are constantly tested and ranked on a narrow set of subjects, giving rise to incessant backstabbing and bitter competition. This has engendered a society bent on self-promotion, lacking almost entirely in any communitarian values that extend beyond the immediate family. This potent legacy persists into one’s adult life: suspicious zero-sum ethos pervades every work environment, limiting the potential of most collaboration.

So should “gaokao” be replaced by other means of selection such as essay writing? The executive offered her insights, “Any subjective standard will result in more unfairness in the society. I cannot think of more objective standards than tests. The question really should be what to test.”

Or perhaps what needs to be challenged is the definition of “good student.” If China can learn to part with its reliance on hard-and-fast answers to complex situations (re: the Cinderella story), then its future workers will be more equipped to deal with real-life situations in an increasingly global economy.

Brutal Costs to the Economy

Given the $20,000 to $30,000 per year price tag –let alone the foreign passport requirement – the more balanced liberal arts education offered by the international schools hardly provides a practical solution to the backward Chinese education system. But as China gets richer, international schools have already become the hot ticket to guaranteeing a promising future for one’s child.

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The logic of your comments would also apply to other countries’ education systems.

For example, I am from Hong Kong. The education system in HK isn’t that different from your descriptions. As far as I know, Japan is also the same according to my Japanese friends (one of whom is doing a PhD).

In my case, I went to a Catholic school. Throughout my school days in HK, I was fed Catholic ideology. Stories told daily from the bible that are completely illogical, and which I am not supposed to challenge!

That reminds me why Italy is doing so badly!

According to your logic, Italians must be complete failures unless they remove their Catholic ideologies from their school system, and let people become free thinkers.

To this day, I still remember my teacher insisting my answers in bible study exams must conform to the teachings of the bible!

Do you seriously believe these people cannot be successful simply because in their bible study exams, they are not allowed to give answers that contradict the teachings of the party … I mean teachings of the bible?

There is lot that could be improved about the Chinese education system for sure, but there are some good things too. All through Chinese history, education was the path to position and power. Even poor illiterate peasants were willing to give everything they had to educate their sons (and sometimes daughters) in hope of family advancement. When the communists took over, one of the best things they did was to declare that China would become an educated nation. Schools were established in the most remote villages, many universities were founded or expanded and Mandarin was promoted as the standard national language. Now, most people can read and write (many in good English) and there is a national ambition to become the leading nation of the world once again. As always, Junh is correct in that the lessons are overly political and that conformity is enforced while creativity is stifled. However, Chinese people are not stupid. Many of the younger ones are able to bridge traditional Chinese and western thinking, so that they are very adaptable, but with a conservative value foundation. Let’s hope that this leads to a good result for China, and for the world.

I can tell you from my own experience that the American K-12 education is a colossal failure. I’m a Korean- American who finished his last year of high school in the States. The math they taught in my senior year at my American high school was at the level of the 4th grade in Korea!!!!!. I don’t want to hear the nonsense that American students are creative. I have found out that American students are neither creative nor knowledgeable in math or science and lack dramatically in reading and writing skills. Both Japan And Korea have the educational systems very similar to that of China. Both of these countries have very high international innovation rankings and China is also moving up the innovation rankings very fast. Chinese students from Shanghai and 11 other regions did very well in the 2009 PISA TEST. According to Dr. Andreas Schleicher who was in charge of the test, you can not do well , if you lack critical thinking which is essential to creativity. Not only Chinese but also Korean and Japanese students came in the top 5 meanwhile American students did very badly. The 2009 PISA TEST proved that American students are neither creative nor knoledgeable. Believe me, the liberal arts education is a lot of bullshit. It creats very ignorant students who lack math and scientific knowledge and It doesn’t even do a good job of teaching the students how to read and write. Every country tries to indoctrinate it’s kids in it’s own way consciously or unconsciously. In my opinon, the East ASIAN education system is basically good. Maybe it needs a fine tuning not an overhaul. Under NO circumstances, China should import crappy AMERICAN k-12 education system.

How many Koreans are saving all their money to come to China to study? I live here in China so I can answer. Very few, and of those most are here to study Chinese language.

While it is certainly true that the “average” American has probably had a crummy education I’ll put America’s best and brightest up against any country’s. China basically “cheats” on these international exams by having the kids from wealthy cities (Shanghai) sit for them.

I teach freshmen at an “average” university here in China and it stuns me how few of them actually think “outside the box” as it were. Many are mindless conformists who believe every silly rumor they read on Weibo. They’re nice, mind you. Too nice, really.

In my opinion Chinese like things like math because it’s pretty hard for it to be at all “controversial.” 2+2 is going to equal 4 no matter what your politics are. It’s also much easier to do well in math through rote memorization than in many other subjects. What makes Chinese “schools” good are hard-working students. It is not the quality of the schools themselves. I’m convinced of that. And, please, don’t even attempt to compare Chinese “creativity” to any Western country. You only sound crazy and/or jealous when you do.